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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Blood" Episode 9

...Well, add car accidents to the list of things that "Blood" has somehow managed to make uninteresting. You know what would have been nice? If Ri-ta could have figured out this vampire stuff through inductive reasoning, or snooping, or an unrelated medical investigation. The fact that it's taken her this long to figure out what's wrong with Ji-sang when there have been so many obvious clues just makes her look kind of dumb.

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In all fairness it's not that Ri-ta is dumb so much as that she rarely ever has an opportunity to look smart. I feel bad for Koo Hye-sun. It's clear that she's trying to make something out of this role but there's just not any material to work with here. Ri-ta lacks agency mainly because she has no clear goal, or even much of an overall conflict. It's a problem that pervades "Blood" really- lots of plot, no sense of urgency.

I blame the writing. While Ahn Jae-hyun has borne the bulk of most of the criticism in this drama, I tried looking at his lines as they must be written out in the script, and yeah, this dialogue is just really bad. I think the failure on his part to do much with the material is just as much the poor quality of the material as it is lack of proper acting experiences. There just isn't any good way to sell a story about vampires who are incredibly bad at keeping secrets, so it's a wonder how they've managed to stay hidden for this long.

For what it's worth, there is the somewhat interesting plot twist at the end which indicates that the age of our vampiric characters may not not measured in centuries, but rather decades. Although I'm not sure this really counts as a plot twist. I only assumed this was an ancient vampire conspiracy because that's how the trope usually works. To someone with no knowledge of vampire stories, there would be no reason to make this assumption.

Then again "Blood" plays around so inconsistently with all the other traditional vampire tropes that any kind of assumptions at all are probably unreasonably founded. I'm actually kind of missing the robot. As goofy as the robot was, it at least had a clear purpose for existing. I have no idea what kind of story "Blood" is trying to tell here, but I'm getting irritated enough that I'll settle for just about anything.

Review by William Schwartz

"Blood" is directed by Ki Min-soo, written by Park Jae-beom-I and features Ahn Jae-hyun, Koo Hye-sun, Ji Jin-hee, Jung Hae-in, Kim Kap-soo, Son Sook and more.

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